Can you replicate Optics Compensation in VSE?
You can directly undistort footage in the Sequencer, once you have it set up correctly in 2.8.

Open up the movie clip editor and open your footage.



To properly choose some distorsion value, we will have to be able to preview the result. Go to the top right of the movie clip editor, click on Clip Display and check Render Undistorted. This will give us the undistorted view of the footage live in the movie clip editor.



Open the Track rider N > Track and go to the Lens Panel. Here are the Lens Distorsion parameters K1, K2 and K3. Change their values and see how the footage (un)distorts itself. It can help to draw a Line Annotation to evaluate the straightness of lines.



Once you are satisfied with the undistorsion go to the sequencer. (You will have to load up all the footages in the movie clip editor which you want to use in the sequencer if you want to undistort them there.)

Add the created movie clip to the sequencer by pressing &#8679; ShiftA > Clip > YourClipName.mov.
Open up the properties panel N and go to the Strip rider. Go to the Adjust > Video panel and check Undistort Clip. The added clip will be rendered undistorted directly from the sequencer.